Stuffed Motherboard????

[Mini-Me]

Hello!
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Some of you may remember that this machine is WindowsME with heaps of bugs, and that I was going to re-install Windows 98SE on it during the Xmas break.

Well, I have done this.

Windows 98 is installed on a 20GB Seagate, which is brand new, with the old 10GB ME drive still in-place, so that I can boot back to ME if needed while i setup the new drive.

Now, the issues I am having are that even with this new drive, which was cleanly formatted and installed from a 98SE CD, almost the exact same problems are happening.
Needless to say, I am a little "Annoyed" about this, to put it politely.
http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/mad.gif

The problems I will list, are common to BOTH the old ME drive, and the new 98SE drive. The old ME drive was originally a 98SE drive, but was "Upgraded" to ME...

The problems are:

* PC re-boots by itself, often when you are in the middle of trying to install software, or copy backup data to the CD-writer.

* Frequent blue-screens-of-death with VxD errors on both the ME and 98SE drives.

* Heaps of "This program has performed an illegal operation, and will be shut down" errors - DETAILS indicate it is usually the 32bit application file that caused the machine to fall over.

* Running standard Windows updates(such as the Internet Explorer 5.5 upgrade) cause the machine to re-boot half-way through(or so) with no prompt - this causes the system to restart with scandisk all the time.

* Currently there are about five programs I tried to install, and they have all failed, and now(due to the machine re-booting itself at the wrong time), I cannot remove them...
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Programs: Musicmatch Jukebox 6, MS Internet Explorer 5.5(keeps saying it was not installed correctly, and would I like to have another go), WinZip 8, Adobe Acrobat reader 5, Winamp 2.

All of these programs are semi-installed, and now will not allow me to remove any of them; uninstaller programs crash saying that ANOTHER illegal operation has happened - this time in the 32bit uninstaller program for that appliaction that I am trying to remove...
Catch-22...
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Incidentally, I have clean-installed many OSes(Windows 3.11, 95, 95b, 98SE, NT, QNX, BeOS, LINUX(lots of different ones) and DOS, so I am quite familiar to what are the known basics, formatting and f-disking, and the do's and don't's.

This machine is:

-Intel Pentium III, 500MHz on a P2BXA(rev. 1.06) motherboard
-256MB DRAM; (1 x 128MB, 2 x 64MB)
-Intel 740 graphics accelerator card
-MITSUMI CD4804TE CD-writer
-40x standard CD-ROM drive

That the same problems would crop up on this machine with two completely different installations, seems to suggest one of the following:

-Motherboard failing
-CPU failing
-RAM failing or partly failed, but not detected

Can anyone help with this?

I have never come accros such a bugg-y machine before.
Can anyone tell me about the P2BXA m/board?
Any good?
prone to problems?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks.


G.


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Windows is the most dangerous computer virus on the Internet.

[John0904]

If this was a system giving to me, the first thing that came to mind was overheating.
Are you able to use programs that can detect temperatures for the CPU and chipset? For instance, http://mbm.livewiredev.com/

Is there a heatsink/fan on the chipset? If not, I would suggest putting one on.
Is the heatsink/fan on the CPU adequately cooling the CPU?

(Ground yourself before touching any components in the computer first.)
If you touch the CPU and chipset they should feel warm with good cooling. However if either one is running hot, that could be the main cause for your random reboots.

If both do feel warm then another cause would be the power supply. If not enough power, it will reboot as well.

Steps what I would do to solve this problem.

1. Adequate cooling? If yes, step 2
2. Adequate power supply? (Remove everything except video card and one hard drive) If yes, step 3
3. Use one RAM chip at a time. If no problems, swap them in the slots. (Some motherboard companies suggest putting the larger RAM into slot 1. (I could be wrong on that).

Other than that, I myself would be lost and would start thinking about the main board itself.

[Mini-Me]

Hello again!
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Thanks for the information and the link.
I will follow the link shortly, and will try all you suggested in the next couple of days.

Intel 730 graphics card runs quite hot.
It has a special chip with a heatsink on it, but no fan.
I would speculate that the heatsink is about 60 - 70 degrees C in temperature(about 170 degrees F).
It is quite hot to the touch.
I have a couple of spare 40mm 12v fans - I might try putting one on this card, although, the computer only ever seems to fall over when doing things with high CPU usage - like installing software, and copying files.

CPU is SLOT-1(i think that's the correct name for it), and is CPU package that replaced the Socket-7 type Pentium chips.

I note that all the new super fast 1GHz + CPU's have returned to the socket-7 type arrangement...

Thanks again - will follow your suggesttions and see what happens.


G.


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Windows is the most dangerous computer virus on the Internet.